More than often, we focus on the cool moves that make us look cool, we have cool lifts, we have cool drops, we have cool music, we have cool poise… but adding up these altogether is not a magical formula to create a cool dance. There is one thing we should never forget: we want a cool dance, then we need to dance. Posing is nice for a camera shot, however, the real dance is for the performance and audience. If you want to blend in two dances, first thing first, you yourself need to know both dances. Knowing it does not mean by copying the movement from DWTS. It is the knowledge about the dance, from their history to their characteristics, from their costumes to their music, from their basics to their variations. After a lot of hard work, it is possible to fuse the dances.
You may feel doubt if we really need to know everything, why can't we just put everything until all beats are stuffed up? Theoretically we can, we can use Chinese Opera music to dance the swing steps then. We can absolutely do it, the question is whether the final product is nice. The ability of anticipating and visualizing the effect is the work of a choreographer. A good choreographer can surprise us with Foxtrot/Swing, Tango/Paso Doble, Cha Cha/Bachata, Salsa/Mambo, Jive/Jazz, etc. I don't mean to say Modern jive can't go with Tango; what I wanted to say is a dance should not be posed! In order not to just pose the dance through the music, we need to know the basic dances.
And, I think, the art of fusing the dances is largely an art of 'balance'. I don't really think that, if you pick a song randomly, the two selected styles can be equally choreographed in one dance. Unless the dances fit with the same type of music like sharing a common tempo and time signature, it seems more reasonable to have one style as the main theme, the other helps present the ideas. Okay, all in short, if the theme is Tango, then Modern Jive moves should assist the presentation of Tango, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the night was a Modern Jive themed, and the dance not only failed to reveal the emotions and the frame of the very aggressive Tango (the Hippies’ smile and the collapsed frame, OMG), but also failed to work the causal feeling of Modern Jive.
Just one thing, a good choreographer not only knows the dances and how to blend the dances, but also knows his/her dancers’ capabilities. A relaxed hold in Tango and a serious tension in Modern Jive both feel very weird. It was not because I wanted to criticize then I wrote, I wrote this because I also made this mistake. I blended cha cha with rumba for a swing guy, and the product was like crap. This, together with my own ugly fusion, has taught me a very good lesson.
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